


Nip and Tuck

by feroxargentea



Category: Master and Commander - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-09
Updated: 2012-02-09
Packaged: 2017-10-30 20:49:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/335912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/pseuds/feroxargentea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“If you spend another two minutes up to your neck in water at this temperature, I will not answer for your life,” said Stephen. “Last time it was nip and tuck, with hot blanket, fomentations, and half a pint of my best brandy.”<br/>—<i>The Wine-Dark Sea</i>, chapter 10</p><p>Author’s note: This story starts out in the last chapter of <i>The Wine-Dark Sea</i> (in which the HMS <i>Surprise</i> is maimed by - amongst other things - a lightning strike). Then it dashes off in the opposite direction, ignoring canon and assuming that the <i>Surprise</i> has to bear away for the nearest attainable land.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nip and Tuck

***

“Naturally I neither comment on nor criticise Captain Aubrey’s actions,” said Stephen Maturin sourly, helping himself to the meagre broken meats left over from the gunroom’s dinner. “I merely observe that a willingness to delegate has always been considered one of the greatest parts of command, at least by all those opposed to megalomaniacal tyranny in all its forms, and that there is no lack of other volunteers willing to be lowered on ropes into the freezing sea for the rehanging of those hinges which I am told are so vital to our progress.”

“Pintles, Doctor, if you will allow me,” replied Lieutenant Grainger patiently, draining the last of his wine, “and the barky can hardly steer effectively without it has some sort of a rudder shipped. And the captain ain’t one of your book-learned shore-taught coves, now. There’s few men understand the construction of a rudder-head quite as well as he, nor how to fashion a steering-oar to replace it, now that ice-mountains and lightning-strikes have done it such a mischief that it no longer answers.”

“And this oar, this steering-oar, would provide the propulsion we lack, with two of our masts gone by the board and these little spars propped up in their place spreading so modest an array of sailcloth?” asked Stephen.

“Well, to tell the truth, the oar is more to stand in for the rudder, do you see? For the sake of directing our course, rather than for—as who should say—propulsion, as such,” said Grainger, with the slow careful intonation of one addressing a problematic child.

“Ah? Indeed, quite so. In comparative anatomy it would be homologous to the pectoral fins, I perceive, rather than the tail fin, despite its posterior or one might say sternal positioning. How curious that man should have come to an arrangement so like and yet so unlike the fashionings of his Creator.”

“As to that I could not rightly say, was you to question me a sennight. But do not you worry, Doctor, you are in safe hands. The Captain will have our fins fixed up before the day is out, sternal or no.”

“I have no doubt of it, no doubt at all,” said Stephen, irritated by the implication that he questioned Jack’s nautical abilities, a misdemeanour tantamount to mutiny in naval eyes and discourteous even by landlubbers’ standards. “My concern is merely for Captain Aubrey himself, for his health. A long voyage from Valparaiso in the cold northerly current and round Cape Horn in temperatures that would have shocked Alexander Humboldt himself, followed by weeks in the high fifties with drift-ice rampant – why, these are waters fit for penguins and albatrosses, not for men in all their frailty. Repeated exposure, repeated immersion, would try the hardiest of constitutions.”

“We was all of us wet through when that ice-mountain collapsed so close and threw up such a great wave, but we took no harm of it, I believe. But I beg your pardon, sir, I am no medico, and I do not mean to intrude on your domain.” Grainger picked up his woollen mittens, bowed politely and withdrew to his cabin.

Stephen sighed. He eyed the half-eaten remnants on his plate for a moment but then laid it aside, his appetite having deserted him, and went wearily back to his own dank little cabin in the orlop, where he lay awake in his cot, staring into the foetid gloom.

“How very irritable Grainger has become of late, beneath the genteel veneer,” he thought. “Or is it I who am become irritable with weariness, snapping at Jack for doing no more than his duty and doing it cheerfully at that? He refused his dose, it is true, but then he almost certainly supposed it a purgative that would have confined him to the quarter-gallery tomorrow, the creature. His notions of medicaments are as incurably narrow as any mariner’s, and as incurably expansive too: self-medicating with Billingsworth’s Patent Embrocation, for all love, the merest empirical quackery, and all the time he believes me unaware. It will do him no more good than his quacksalves have done his corneal abrasion. It is the greatest fool that he is; he can barely see out of that eye now, when such a superficial lesion should have been resolved weeks back.”

Stephen was indeed weary, as weary as a man rightly could be who had spent all morning in the careful sorting of his Peruvian collection and the packing of it, wrapped in oiled silk and sailcloth parcels, into watertight casks in the hold, and then all afternoon in the sickbay, treating two men injured by falls from ice-coated rigging and another three struck by lightning, the same lightning that had annihilated the rudder.

One of the latter patients had been so damaged by the electrical fluid that had coursed through him that Stephen, having tracked the fellow’s heartbeat as it fluttered crazily under his fingertips, had every expectation of a prodigiously curious dissection by the following day. He wondered whether his friend Mr Crilly of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh would want the disordered organ and the scorched disc of skin overlying it for his new museum, along with the set of comminuted tarsal fractures that Stephen had just put up for the purpose in spirits of wine, an excellent specimen of that typical nautical injury so frequently produced by recoiling cannons. Perhaps Stephen might even donate the blackened gangrenous toes he kept tucked away in an old snuff-box, the chisel-marks still clear on their severed ends.

“Effects of frostbite on Naval Surgeon, Peru 1813,” he thought. “The visible effects, at least, since the mental effects, alas, cannot be so easily bottled and labelled... Oh how very hazy my faculties are become this evening, and without a drop of poppy to excuse them.” The laudanum decanter, emptied of its contents and never refilled since Padeen’s departure, would be in the bottle-rack, and the coca pouch would be on the lid of his sea chest. He would turn over to check that it was so; any moment now he would turn over, just to check...

He fell into an uneasy sleep, dreaming of chisels and his cure-all leaf.

***

Stephen awoke at the end of the middle watch—that time when the life-spirit, regardless of the tide, is at its lowest ebb—with the notion that something was wrong, a notion that gripped him with such immediate force that no logic could dismiss it. Jack, he remembered, had looked pale with exhaustion beneath the hectic flush brought on by his immersion in the ice-strewn seawater, had made no mention of music or their usual supper of toasted cheese, seldom neglected even when neither soft-tack nor cheese was to be had within hundreds of sea-miles, and had made no protest when Stephen departed for the gunroom.

“I shall but put my head in the door of his sleeping-cabin. The Devil take that great ninny if he has caught a chill, but if he has, it might be as well if treatment should commence immediately,” Stephen muttered, fishing for his list slippers in the detritus of his cabin-floor. “Or perhaps I shall merely send the sentry in to check that all is well.”

He shuffled as far as the ladder, where he peered up at the dim light from the hatchway. Very dim, it seemed, and very far away, and suddenly he felt that it might be best after all if he laid his head down on the deck for a moment, just to cool his cheek against the chill damp of the planking, just until his breath came back, and until his mind stopped spinning, and until the blackness let him go.

***

“’E was muttering something about flightless grebe skellingtins, God ’elp him. ’E don’t know where ’e is,” said Killick, unfolding more blankets than Jack had known the ship possessed. “If them fucking idle-arsed tar-spots ’adn’t of chased Mr Adam’s marmoset down this way, we wouldn’t of found ’im till morning.”

“Thank God for idle boys and small monkeys, then,” said Jack with a weak attempt at levity. He was alternately pacing the sleeping-cabin and adjusting the bedclothes around Stephen’s slight form as he lay in Jack’s cot. Having carried him there, wrapped him up and made the cabin as warm as was feasible in such latitudes, there was nothing for Jack to do but sit and await the outcome, and sitting and waiting without interfering were not amongst Jack Aubrey’s greatest talents.

“Yessir. Don’t you touch them pillows, sir,” snapped Killick. “’Ere, give us that ’ot pig,” he added, snatching a heated brick from his mate Grimble, wrapping it efficiently in a towel and tucking it at Stephen’s feet. “Now go and get another one ’otted up on the stove, quick as you please. And fetch the best brandy and the inspissated lemon juice from the Captain’s stores while you’re at it.”

Grimble did not even glance at Jack for his permission before scuttling out of the room.

“Which you can mix ’em up and make the Doctor drink it when ’e wakes up,” Killick told Jack with an air of absolute authority that Jack knew would last until Stephen did in fact wake up. _If_ Stephen woke up, he thought to himself, but the words slid away from him. He touched the back of his hand to Stephen’s cheek as if to test its temperature. _When_ Stephen woke up. When.

***

“We ought to have kept a closer eye on Dr Maturin in the gunroom, sir,” said Pullings, standing awkwardly at the cabin door, water dripping from his Magellan jacket and forming a small pool at his feet. “He must have been sadly overworked, treating all the injuries of the last fortnight.”

“ _Quis custodiet ipsos custodes_ , as my father the General used to say,” said Jack half-distractedly, as he added another generous shovelful of coal to the hanging stove, spilling a few pieces onto the deck.

“Eh, ah...” Pullings looked alarmed. “I do not know, sir.”

“‘Who will guard the guards’, Mr Pullings. Or to put it another way, who will doctor the Doctors?” A rather good thing, in its way, Jack thought, and had automatically half-turned to Stephen before the quicker part of his mind recalled that there would be no response. He flinched and turned quickly back to Pullings. “None of this is your fault, Tom. In all truth, Dr Maturin spent little enough time in the gunroom. I would have noticed something was wrong myself if I had not been too busy fretting over the goddamn rudder.”

They stood there together in the cramped sleeping-cabin, listening to Stephen’s rasping breaths, until Jack became aware of Pullings’ growing unease.

“Thankee, Tom. You had better get back to the quarterdeck.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Pullings paused another moment in the doorway, apparently fumbling for words, and then he saluted and left.

***

Stephen awoke days later, furious at himself and everyone around him for the lost time, the needless treatments and the wasted sympathy. There was nothing wrong with him, nothing at all—he brushed Jack’s hand away from his forehead brusquely—it was absurd to suggest any such thing; was he not a physician and the rest of them mere meddling fools? To the deuce with them all, and—

Jack caught him as he fell, lifted him back into his cot and re-arranged the blankets with maddening patience. “There now, lie still, will you not, dear Stephen? Killick will bring you hot broth.”

“Killick be damned! A little weakness is all, a little myasthenia, no more. Leave that coverlet be, Jack Aubrey, your soul to the Devil. As soon as I have rested, I shall...”

Jack only smiled at him, that singularly sweet smile that would have enraged Stephen if he could have found the energy and if an unconquerable somnolence had not enveloped him like a sudden sea-mist.

He gave in. His fury would keep. When he struggled back to consciousness, Jack would still be there, waiting.

***

“Oh! Oh!” Stephen cried, peering at the view for the sake of which he had been carried from the Great Cabin, bundled up in woollen blankets and topped with a vile Monmouth cap in spite of the heat. “Table Mountain, is it not? Have we truly sailed such a distance in almost no time at all?”

“Three and a half thousand miles in two months, Doctor, and we were fortunate not to take longer, though I dare say it seems short enough to one who slept through most of it,” replied Jack.

Stephen lowered his voice. “But tell me, sir, how sure are we of our welcome at the Cape? It has been a long while since we had any word of its current sovereignty, has it not? Might not the Dutch have recaptured it by now?”

“To speak plainly, Doctor, any landfall is a good deal better than none, and if wishes were horses then...” Jack floundered briefly, “...that is to say, we cannot look a wish-horse in the mouth, nor a wish-pig or wish-sheep, come to that. We have been on shocking short commons these last few weeks, and our water ain’t quite the thing either. The crew cannot possibly hold out to any other port, that is the long and the short of it, and be damned to the Dutchmen.”

“Do you tell me so?” Stephen glanced more keenly at the faces around him, the figures suddenly striking in their leanness. And Jack, he realised suddenly, was very far from his usual portly self, even if his arms gripped as strongly as ever. These were the same men who had been tempting him with dainty titbits and wheedling him to eat a little more, just a little more to buoy up his strength, and all the while half-starving themselves. He could not look at the coast, then, nor at his shipmates, but glanced down at the deck.

Jack, sensing his confusion, nodded at the little knot of officers and carried him back into the Great Cabin.

“There, Stephen, you must not take another chill,” he said, setting him carefully onto the stern-lockers. “Let me get you some warm brandy.”

“We have some left, do we?” asked Stephen sharply.

Jack met his eyes. “We have a measure or two, yes, and there’s not a man-jack of us begrudges you that or anything else, as you well know. You will not be angry with me, old Stephen, will you? We are arrived safely, and all is well.”

“I am not angry with you, joy, never in life. It is only that I realise myself to have been a burden on you for months, and not just for the last few minutes as I had been supposing.”

“Oh, never a burden, brother, never that,” said Jack.

“Well, if you have yet the strength to carry me, you cannot be so very diminished, and you had plenty of excess corpulence to lose, God knows.” Stephen looked at Jack with an expression more smile than grimace. “For once, my dear, we shall not look so very mismatched.”

“Mismatched? I never thought we was mismatched,” said Jack.

“No,” said Stephen thoughtfully. “No, I do not suppose we were. Give me your hand, Jack, and help me up whilst I find my sea-legs.”

Jack took him by both arms and held him upright as he practised shuffling around the cabin until his muscles felt a little firmer.

“There now, Stephen, will you not sit down again? We have only another hour before we dock, and you must be rested.”

“At least I shall not be carried ashore like an invalid; whether we go ashore as heroes or prisoners, I mean to walk by your side. Here, if you would assist me to the chair... thank you, Jack.”

 “You will be ready in an hour? I will send Killick to dress you, and Bonden to help you onto the deck.”

“I shall. Thank you, soul, for everything.” Stephen nodded at him, the gesture conveying his deeper gratitude more plainly than any words.

Jack nodded back, stood a moment contemplating him, nodded again and walked out onto the quarterdeck to give the orders that would carry the _Surprise_ safely into harbour.

 

**Author's Note:**

> With apologies to Esteven, who asked for ill!Jack. I tried, I tried, but the characters don't do what they're told!


End file.
